Boyne finished the first draft of ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ in sixty straight hours at age 33. The moment he typed the last sentence, a second book announced itself, and he created a placeholder that sat on his hard drive for the better part of two decades.

John Boyne

the day I finished it, I thought to myself, at some point in my life, I would like to go back to Gretel, Bruno’s sister, and explore her life. And for all those years between then and, I guess around 2020, when I started, 2021 maybe, when I started writing All the Broken Places, I kept a file on my computer called ‘Gretel’s Story,’ which was my working title for the book. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jaipur Literature Festival, “All the Broken Places | John Boyne in conversation with Merve Emre, introduced by Kevin Kelly”

What finally opened that file was not a new idea but a new set of questions. The lockdowns of 2020 gave him time to think about a pattern that had troubled him for years: perpetrators who walked away from the war and were never made to answer for what they had done.

John Boyne

It was during the pandemic, actually, that I started thinking about her again. And I started thinking about the concept of justice and people who had escaped justice for crimes that they committed during World War II. [paraphrased from audio]

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Meg Mosier, “Book Talk for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne”

Boyne had always been drawn to characters at the edge of atrocity rather than its center, and Gretel occupied a morally useful position that Bruno never could. Her age during the war meant she saw things her younger brother did not, and that visibility made her a more demanding subject.

John Boyne

Gretel was a character who was perhaps more morally complicit than Bruno. Bruno was quite naive, but Gretel understood a lot more about what was going on. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jaipur Literature Festival, “All the Broken Places | John Boyne in conversation with Merve Emre, introduced by Kevin Kelly”

Choosing a German protagonist rather than a victim required a defense he had thought through carefully. He was not making a claim about equivalence; he was making a claim about range, about the different stories a single historical event can generate and the different moral territory each one maps.

John Boyne

Writing about German characters during that time and their experience of the war and how it affects the national psyche for the decades going forward... I think that’s a story worth telling. And it doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring the stories of the real victims at all. It’s just telling more stories. [paraphrased from audio]

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Speak Up Magazine, “An Interview with John Boyne”

The tonal shift from the first book was not a choice so much as a necessity. ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ worked because its narrator was too young to name what he was seeing, and that innocence gave the book its fable quality. At 91, Gretel names everything, and no amount of stylistic blurring could pretend otherwise.

John Boyne

I knew I couldn’t go back to that sort of fable-like, fairy tale-like tone. It would seem forced now, whereas when I wrote it originally, it seemed very natural to me. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jaipur Literature Festival, “All the Broken Places | John Boyne in conversation with Merve Emre, introduced by Kevin Kelly”

The book’s dual timeline anchors Gretel’s present-day London life against three historical episodes, each city chosen not for period color but for the specific pressure it applies. He has explained the logic of the Sydney section with particular care, because Australia might look like escape but was designed to function as a trap.

John Boyne

I used Australia because it’s also the furthest you can go away from Europe without coming home again. And I thought for Gretel, she would go there thinking, I can leave my past behind, if I go this far. But of course she can’t, because the past invades on her immediately almost there. [paraphrased from audio]

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Jaipur Literature Festival, “All the Broken Places | John Boyne in conversation with Merve Emre, introduced by Kevin Kelly”

Each city in the timeline tightens the same screw from a different direction. Paris exposed her to the punishment being handed to collaborators, making silence a matter of survival. Sydney brought an unexpected confrontation. London made silence a matter of love.

John Boyne

Moving to Paris immediately after the war, she must protect her identity in a country where collaborationists are being brutally punished. In Sydney in the 1950s, she is shocked to encounter an old adversary from the camps. And, when she finally moves to London and falls in love with a Jewish man, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to remain silent about her past.

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betterreading.com.au, “Author Q&A: 5 Quick Questions with Bestselling Author John Boyne | Better Reading”

He designed the two books around a structural contrast that he has said is partly autobiographical in its proportions. He was 33 when he invented Bruno, not far removed from childhood himself. He was 50 when he returned to Bruno’s family as a man closer to Gretel’s history than to the boy’s.

John Boyne

I knew I wanted to almost balance ‘Striped Pyjamas’ in the sense that the first one is from the point of view of this very naive child, and the second one is from the point of view of a very wise elderly lady. And my age is actually halfway between the two, you know, between the nine and the 91. [paraphrased from audio]

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Speak Up Magazine, “An Interview with John Boyne”

Boyne has said that when he teaches writing he always asks students to identify what a novel is about beneath the level of its plot. In his Author’s Note for this book, he turned that question on himself and answered it in terms that place guilt and complicity ahead of history.

John Boyne

it is a novel about guilt, complicity, and grief, a book that sets out to examine how culpable a young person might be, given the historical events unfolding around her, and whether such a person can ever cleanse themselves of the crimes committed by the people she loved.

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goodreads.com, “All the Broken Places Quotes by John Boyne”

The Author’s Note goes further than naming the book’s themes. In the sentence that precedes that description, Boyne names the specific human type the novel is really hunting: not the commanders and architects of atrocity, but the people who stood close enough to see and chose to say nothing.

John Boyne

I have less interest in the monsters than I do in the people who knew what the monsters were doing and deliberately looked away.

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neverimitate.wordpress.com, “Book Review: All the Broken Places – neverimitate”

Gretel at 91 is not simply an old woman looking back. What Boyne wants readers to feel is the particular weight of a life that registered what happened and then carried that registration in silence for nearly a century. The question the novel poses at the end is whether anything can be done with that weight at so late an hour.

John Boyne

The book really explores the kind of silence that she has lived with for all these years. And the fact that she has survived but hasn’t really lived. [paraphrased from audio]

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Meg Mosier, “Book Talk for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne”

That question of belatedness, whether a gesture made at 91 constitutes redemption or only its ghost, is what Boyne leaves unresolved, and the discomfort of that irresolution is the book’s final argument.